alto but they are primarily a southern california firm. the cost of the search includes a no cost repeat in case the search is terminated. we don't know the answer to the question that was raised and since he is not here, i tried to find it out by looking through the documents that we got from the vendors but we don't know if the person selects to leave as in this last situation, i do not believe they will do a no cost. the proposal cost for alliance is the lowest of the finalists and they have indicated that they are going to assign the founding member that has been the longest with the organization to the recruitment

group so that it would contain that individual and a manager that's been there for a while, but not as long as the founding member. and it's, he wanted to make the point that it's what would be called a comprehensive or a corporate approach to the recruitment including reference checking of the candidates as part of the preliminary assessment. normally when you reference check it's after everything is short listed to the people and then you do the reference checks. these individuals are doing it towards the front. in terms of bob murray, they are a known vendor, they have been involved with the prior department director. their level of understanding may be beneficial. he is not indicated as being the principle that will be team,

instead they put in an individual whose background is in law enforcement and has experience with the fbi, police kinds of model of doing work. bob murray will conduct personal interviews with the top 10 to 12 candidates to make sure that they have the best potential and then he's going to do a public records request on candidates to determine if additional inquiries of the candidates are necessary. that was in quotes, public records. either individual would be able to do the job, it's up to you to make the decision. he is committed to work with you and the vendor to make sure

this is a good, has a good outcome and that the commission is satisfied with the choice. >> thank you, deputy director. so at this point, just open it up to my fellow commissioners and let's have some dialogue. where do you want to take this? >> commissioner, what was the cost difference between bob murray and alliance? >> bob murray was $19,500 and alliance was $17,500. >> these are plus expenses. i'm sorry to interrupt, but they are plus expenses. at this point in either case that is kind of unknown how much that would be. often that is travel of the individual -- i'm sorry, of the candidate if they choose to bring the candidate here if they aren't local or in

the region. but i think you could make the same assumption that the expenses for each would be in the same ballpark. >> i'm sorry, pam, where did you say bob murray was based? >> his basis is roseville, california. >> roseville, yeah. and palo alto for alliance. >> commissioner clinch. >> pam, the alliance had sort of the guarantee if someone were to be terminated they would come back with a no cost search again, but what about bob murray, did we ask if he would offer something like that? >> the issue we can do as part of the -- so once you get these proposals then you sit down and you sit across from them and

you negotiate. we probably could negotiate but it's not mentioned specifically in the proposal. the others made a very direct guarantee. >> my understanding, though, pam, would be that ted would have asked that question to bob murray, they just didn't respond. >> that's my assumption. >> the question would have been asked and if they didn't respond we have to assume that that's not on the table. plus obviously it could be negotiated at a later point, but at this point, yeah. >> it's harder to negotiate that. >> we got two good firms here. i think we should just pick who and be -- commissioner melgar. >> to me, the single most important thing that you said was that alliance had conducted recent searches in marin, san

mateo, san josement i know having those relationships and having a pool of talent in the area is really important. to me that's, like, the single most weighty issue is to have a firm that has recent experience with this and also those established relationships, they've been looking at qualified people in the area. >> looking at this list here, it looks like bob murray's placements have largely been in the central valley, while alliance's has been in the bay area. >> the gentleman that's assigned to this from bob murray is the same gentleman --

pam, correct me -- who was assigned to the last director. i believe that's the same. we checked that on the brochure, right? >> i think bob murray worked directly, but i don't know. >> it's on the brochure there. just, you know, a point i know his background is in police and fbi and this kind of thing but he did do the last search the last time, the same gentleman. anyhow. >> i just wanted to say both firms could do the work but i would like to just say i concur with commissioner melgar and commissioner clinch said about recent experience and also their experience in housing and inspection areas because that's what they specifically hired for in those other counties that were fairly close so they

have some knowledge of doing that recently. so, you know, if both firms could do the work, i with like to say we should be involved in actually -- if we pick one to put forth the thing about if someone would leave during the year, if they left during the first year whether it's because we decided not to keep them or they decided, you know, they got a better offer from washington, dc or something like that, that would also concern me because that happens quite a bit with executives. since there's a new administration all over the place that we would also take into consideration whether the search would help us again at either no cost or very low cost. but i think we would cross that when we get to it. i would like to say given what we know now, i would like to make a motion that we go with

alliance unless there's other strong feelings among the other commissioners. >> excuse me, you were correct. the guy who was involved --. >> what's his name? >> is the same person. >> john malmouth from the city attorney's office. the item on the agenda is not for action so the actual selection is not before you. this is still just a discussion item. >> so i'm confused. >> me, too. >> does that mean -- i thought that this body had the -- or do you mean it's just not listed as such and we can't take action until january? >> correct. while the bic has the authority to authorize the contract, the way it's been -- the way it's angendized for

today's calendar does not allow you it take action today. >> so we can post it as an action item. >> correct. >> parliamentarian. >> well, actually, the buck stops here with me. i was under the impression we're taking action on this today. i have it apologize to my fellow commissioners, that was the whole idea we were going to discuss it here today. so, with that, can i amend that now at this stage? no? >> no. i think the options that are available to the commission if you want to act on this quickly is to schedule a special meeting and find a date in january. i think there is another --. >> january 16th (inaudible). >> oh, that's not until

february. so there could be a special meeting scheduled in january. your next meeting is the 16th. for either one of those, i could work with the president to come up with the agenda language that gives the bic flexibility to make the appropriate decision. >> i think we need to all -- we basically all need to vote on this. i think that will be the -- what you're saying to come up, john, with some language on a special meeting or just the next meeting. >> either one, it's up to the commission how you want to proceed. just a special meeting -- the next regularly scheduled meeting is january 16th and if you wanted to make this decision earlier than

that, we'd have to find a meeting date earlier in january to do it. >> so what's in front of us, commission, is whether we should have a special meeting on this, that's 1, or 2, we wait until january 16th. >> i would love to do this quicker rather than later, but i will be out of town until the 7th and i imagine many other people will, too, since that's when school starts again. the 16th is just as well for me. >> right. >> okay, so why don't we calendar it for the next meeting and we will make sure the action (inaudible) and we will take it from there. should we -- do we make a motion that if we select the firm now and have that as part of the approval? >> no, the agenda item the way

it's calendared is only a discussion item , so there's no motions or actions for the commission to take. but you could come up with a, sort of a consensus position that you ask be calendared, the commission can come up with a consensus position that the president would work with the city attorney's office on agenda language for the 16th. >> okay, all right, we'll have the language correct on the 16th and do we take public comment now on this item and then on the next meeting we don't have to take public comment on it; is that correct? >> whenever there's an agenda item, you need to have public comment. you need to have public comment for today's agenda item and if you take it up on the 16th, public comment again as well then. >> okay, all right. okay, then, public comment.

>> public comment on item no. 7. >> spencer gash once again and i'm ad libbing here. this delay, it's been, like, 6 months, i think, and you still haven't chosen who's going to do the selection or potential selection of a director. this just bespeaks to some of the problems or the dysfunction of this department, including yourself. and i'd like to go over a little bit of the history here. the last time we went through the recruitment process we hired seemingly a good person who washed out after a year. he couldn't take it. maybe the language jeff long of the

person selected should be considered. then the department unwisely chose the permit person from alameda. i have to blame the current staff which stayed on after the last director left. i think they are responsible for this. here you are keeping them in this situation where they are trying to hold the lid on this stew pot of corruption and to be honest with you folks i think you are doing yourselves a disservice because i think the stew pot is going to overflow before you get a new director. best wishes, thank you. >> thank you. any further public comment? seeing none. >> item 8, director's report, 8 a, update on dbi's finances. >> pamela levin, department of building inspection. i'm going to make this very quick. you have a report that has the documents that are up here so

i'm going to do this very quickly. we are currently looking at having approximately 7 1/2 million at the end of the fiscal year. this is predicated on a similar type of hiring that we have been doing, in other words, we have a certain number of vacancies this year and we had originally expected to have a lot of them filled by january. we are off about a month for several of them because the testing is taking longer. so by the end of the year we expect to have some salary savings and we're making the assumption at this point that it's $2 million, but i'm hoping we will keep the pace and continue to have the participation of the human resources department in helping us do the various testing. i got a message today that the

list for the building inspectors was adopted yesterday. i'm getting those messages that we are finally getting towards the end on a lot of the various positions to where we do the interviews and we can hire. so i'm hoping that for the exams that are almost done we'll meet the january-february time frame and that the arrangements that i have made with human resources will allow some of the rest of the positions to be hired by the end of june. as you can tell, the charges for services are still tracking higher than what would be at this point in time. they are -- i think that we're just doing in terms of comparison that we've gone through 41, 42

percent of the year and we've received 63 percent of the charges for service revenue, just kind of speaks to how well the economy is doing right now and -- but i wouldn't do a straight line that the second part of the year is going to be like the first part of the year. we know there are several projects that are coming in, we know there's a change in the mayor's office of housing in terms of the threshold of the charges for inclusionary housing. we may see, you know, a large increase. we're hoping that that's the case. apartment and rental fees, i think anybody who lives here knows taxes were due december 10 at the latest. we still haven't gotten, we won't know until january what the results of how we're doing in that first payment of the property taxes. the reason i say that is the apartment fees are tied to the

roll, they are built along with your property tax so that's when they come in. >> in terms of expenses, as i mentioned, 40 percent of the budget has been expended for personnel and we're at 42 percent of the year so we're just, we're slowly catching up and i expect by the end of the year, as i said, we'll be not completely fully staffed but we're getting there. the other sort of expenses or trends that we're seeing in expenses is they are starting to bill out the work orders but most of the departments don't bill them out until january for the first 6 months of the year so that's where we'll see the

large ones, which one largest is the city attorney's office. so we're waiting for that. just kind of a footnote. next meeting we'll be presenting the first iteration of the budget. we are working on requests right now from the various decisions and seeing what their needs are and we are waiting till we have 6 months of revenues in order to do a projection for next fiscal year. as i think you -- as many of you know, we are now doing a two-year budget. we reopen right now the second year, which next year will be the second year, so we start at the point of we proposed this budget and now we can make some changes to it. and the fact that our revenues are coming in higher than we expected gives us some flexibility to do some

of the projects that we have been delaying. we will have a special meeting in february to do the, to pass the final budget that's going to be submitted to the mayor's office and the submission date is february 21st. so we have to keep a kind of tight schedule in order to be able to meet that date. >> thank you, deputy director. >> item 8b, update on proposed legislation. >>. >> good morning, commissioners, bill strong with legislative and public affairs. rethe earlier discussion with supervisor mar's aide, nick, on the grab bars, he did reconfirm before he left the hearing room

that our permit legislation will be heard at land use on february 14. it's taken a bit longer than expected but we're looking for a positive recommendation from the committee to go to the full board, so i think that will probably get approved in january by the full board. as you know there is legislation that supervisor khu is still working on that's kind of a part 2 of the amendments he made earlier to the apartment convention ordinance and this one has to deal with shared housing. the most recent status on that is his aides have come back to us and have asked us to propose a fee structure because we would be responsible to come up with a

registration process for those folks that own property and wanted to take advantage of what this legislation proposes to do, which means you could rent space for up to 90 days a year and it would also include registration by some of these hosting organizations such as vacation rentals by owners and so 40ment -- forth. some of the legislation is still in the drafting stage but just to let you know, that is still underway. you have heard about the grab bar legislation that was discussed earlier. the only other one that i'll mention is i have attended a few meetings concerning this maher toxic ordinance update. people from the public health department and also on planning are working on a redrafted version

of that where projects would probably be required to do soil testing and ground water testing if they were in areas that dph didn't have sufficient data about potential toxickities on those items. that could affect how quickly we can release building permits because those would have to be certified by dph because we can issue the building permit. i don't expect that to move through the legislature until january or february. but with that, that's about it. state wise, nothing is going on. as you know the state legislature is in recess and will be until january. >> sorry, bill. commissioner lee has a question. >> the shared housing

ordinance, will that come before the code advisory committee before it becomes --. >> i am assuming, yes, it will go to cac for review once we actually have the legislation. right now we don't have the legislation. >> my other concern there, bill, is this, you know, the drilling. have you read the legislation in detail? >> on shared housing? on the toxic -- yeah, i've had a look at the current draft. it doesn't look too onerous at this point. it does rely on dph and planning updating the existing kind of ma-her hot spots and a lot of it i think is going to be more affecting dph and puc, which may have infrastructure projects going on in different parts of the city and it sounds as though they are very amenable, they,

the people behiepld the legislation right now, to having a self-certification process where those two departments can continue to do the work they need to do. so right now i'm not expecting this to become unnecessarily bureaucratic. >> is it based on, you have to drill at a certain depth? >> yeah, i don't know what the exact parameters are right now. but if your project got within a certain number of feet of, let's say, the ground water aquafer --. >> would you have to get a

conditional use? >> i don't know the answer to that right now. one of those things we can ask about. >> so in january that's coming? >> i'm expecting it to come back with another version. >> who --. >> dph is taking the lead with some input from planning on putting this together and there is a city attorney that's working with them on it. >> and it's just an amendment to the code? >> it's an amendment to this existing legislation that's referred to as the ma-her toxickity legislation. it's an ordinance that was started when bill maher was still a commissioner years ago. >> item 8c, update on permit tracking system.

>> (inaudible) project director dbi the first project is the public portal. we've been closely working with the vendor and planning designing requirements. the vendor has been configuring as we define the requirements then we've been reviewing with staff, people that work the counters, people among the -- we're getting a lot of input on that. it's looking very good. the next step is we're forming a citizen access committee. we've already met the building and planning commission around plans for that. dbi and planning are in the process of nominating the members of that committee and we're expecting it to be about 16 people. the first meeting is being scheduled for january 30th. the plan is for this committee to do reviews of this system.

about 1 to 2 hours a month for about 3 months ending sometime in april. and this would be a review rather than a user acceptance test. the other items are excella automation. so that's our internal staff product. we've got a lot going on. there's development in a lot of various statements, requirements, configuration, review, et cetera, and that includes the user acceptance test plan. we've developed that plan. we're working closely with the staff to come up with test cases and then in january we'll have a kick off meeting where the staff will actually start executing those test cases. the next item is data conversion. we're working closely with planning and the vendor on mapping all